How To Start A WordPress Blog (Part 1)

[00:00:00] Hey, before we get started, I just want to let you know that there is a contest still going on and you can enter to win a bunch of stuff at podcastinsights.com slash pump up. That's podcastinsights.com slash P-U-M-P-U-P and you can win one annual pro subscription

[00:00:21] to Castos Podcast Hosting, two months of full service podcast production and editing services, lifetime access to my podcast website launchpad course, one annual membership to headliner pro and one annual membership to squadcast pro. So again, go to podcastinsights.com slash pump up to enter to win.

[00:00:44] Hey, thanks for listening to the podcasting simplified podcast. My name is Ross and today we're going to talk about how to start a WordPress blog for your podcast or not. Now I know I've been talking a bunch about why you need to start a website, a WordPress

[00:01:04] website for your podcast, how crucial that is to really take it to the next level, make it easy to share, make it easy to grow. And I actually have shared previously, but I get about 50% of my listeners from people

[00:01:18] on a desktop or laptop, not on a mobile device and that is because of the website. So it's really important and I'm going to keep talking about it so I can help you grow your show.

[00:01:30] Now, learning how to start a WordPress blog can be both fun and profitable, but if you do it without a little guidance and some tips on kind of things to do, you can easily get frustrated and quit and we don't want that.

[00:01:43] So I'm going to run you through how I would start a podcast, no, how I would start a WordPress blog in 2020 plus give you a few popular options and tips. So we're going to go through a little bit of everything, how to choose a topic which may

[00:02:01] or may not apply if you already have a podcast. Go through the domain name, WordPress hosting, theme, customizing with plugins, stuff like that. And also if you look in the show notes I have a blog post for all this stuff so

[00:02:14] you'll want to read it and see screenshots and be able to kind of reference it a little bit easier. Be sure and check that out and you can both listen and read either way.

[00:02:25] So first thing you need to do is come up with a domain name and that's usually going to be the same thing as your podcast name. And you know, you want something that's specific enough so it will resonate with

[00:02:36] your audience but not too specific that you can't maybe expand and grow beyond it over the course of a year or more. And there are over four million blog posts published every day so it's really important to be unique. I have a little example.

[00:02:58] So if you think about this way, if you're getting heart surgery would you rather go do a heart surgeon or a general surgeon? And that one is pretty obvious but that same sort of logic applies to your podcast and to your website.

[00:03:10] So go with the specific option that will resonate with your audience. Now how do you choose a blog topic or a podcast topic? You might have some ideas already but here's a couple things to think about.

[00:03:24] Something that you want to make sure you have plenty of content to talk and or write about so not too narrow. It's interesting to you so you're going to keep doing it and then there's an audience of other people who are interested in it as well.

[00:03:37] Now I have a few ideas to help you kind of brainstorm and so this will apply for your podcast or website either one but think about what other people struggle with and so what do your friends, family or colleagues complain about that you do easily?

[00:03:54] And what do people compliment you on and feel free to go ask some people what you're good at and then also how do people introduce you to others? What do they say you're great at?

[00:04:05] What would you do if you had an extra three hours free and what would you talk about with a friend for three hours? So these are obviously things that you would be interested in and then what do you do

[00:04:16] on a Saturday afternoon so when you're not working what do you enjoy and what do you like to do? What are you excited about and what other people do that you think is cool and interesting?

[00:04:27] It's not something you do now but you want to get started or learn more about it. And what I would do is take a few minutes and write out a bunch of these ideas good

[00:04:35] or bad just kind of brainstorm all this stuff and then once you get those down kind of narrow them down so circle ones maybe or make a new list of ones that really after the second pass sound good and kind of go from there.

[00:04:50] Now once you have that figured out I do have some tips on choosing a domain name that I have talked about in a previous episode and I also will leave a link to a blog post about that things like using a dot com and keeping it short

[00:05:06] stuff like that. The next step you need is WordPress hosting so I've talked about that in previous episodes and I recommend a couple last episode I mentioned I use Kinsta and then I also recommend Bluehost for cost purposes so it's

[00:05:22] quite a bit cheaper and they have a great kind of easy to start way to start with WordPress. So with Bluehost you can just I have some some instructions on this blog post basically it tells you which plans you should select so they have a

[00:05:38] basic one for if you only need one one website it's the cheapest way to go if you need more than one website there's another option so really that's that's up to you and then you can either get a free domain name

[00:05:52] through Bluehost for the first year so you can you don't have to know that right away when you sign up so you can you can choose it later or you can get it right away when you do your initial sign up process.

[00:06:04] And then there's a couple other things that you some optional services that they offer and the only one that I really would would make sure you have is who is privacy so you don't get a bunch of spam calls

[00:06:19] and in direct mail but that will just prevent your your personal information from being out in the public. Anyway you sign up for 12 24 or 36 month plan and I believe the 12 month plan is fifty six dollars or something with with the link here

[00:06:44] and then you know it goes up you pay more when you when you get longer term plan but you pay less per month so it's kind of a little little tradeoff is how much you want to do up front and then last

[00:06:56] episode I talked all about Kinsta so I'm not going to kind of go into that again but that's a great option they just start at thirty dollars a month and you get quite a kind of comprehensive hosting and backups

[00:07:08] and CDN and DNS services and all kinds of stuff together. Now there's kind of a common question about WordPress dot org versus WordPress dot com and they're really completely different. They use the same kind of WordPress CMS but it's a little bit different

[00:07:27] so WordPress dot com is a service that you you pay monthly to and they host everything and then they have limitations on themes and plugins you can use unless you're on their business plan which is twenty five dollars a month and for the most part I just don't

[00:07:47] recommend WordPress dot com to most people now WordPress dot org is technically a self hosted version and that's what you would use when you're hosting with Bluehost or Kinsta and because it's for one it's free the core WordPress you just pay for the

[00:08:06] servers and you don't really need to know more than that just to make sure that you don't sign up through WordPress dot com. When you first get in install WordPress there's some settings that you want to change right away that really aren't great to

[00:08:23] have selected so I do have a few here there so delete the default post page and comment they'll say something like hello world or first comment some real real generic you want to get rid of those right away and then you also want to make sure that

[00:08:38] you have a strong password on your administrator login so that people don't hack your website and I've actually had this happen I set up a website for someone and I forgot to set a strong password and it was hacked and then I had to go

[00:08:54] clean it up and it's just a just a pain and if you don't know how to clean it up it's it's more of a pain so just make sure you use a good password and then you also want to make

[00:09:05] sure you have your site title tagline and time zone set up under settings general preferences and then there is a setting called permalinks that you want to change to post name that's under settings permalink and that's

[00:09:19] just how your URL is set up so once you change that you don't have to touch it again and then change your default category I'm pretty sure it says something like uncategorized so you want to change the name of that default category to

[00:09:35] something that makes sense so maybe it's podcast or maybe it's a subtopic of your your main topic whatever you want to do and you can create more categories too but just go ahead and change that so you don't just have an uncategorized

[00:09:48] section looks kind of like you like you're new and just getting started so you don't want that now wordpress themes there's some free themes you can do if you don't want to pay right away wordpress comes with some default themes I

[00:10:04] think 2020 is the latest one that you can you can get started with or you can search I'm not a big fan of the free themes I actually recommend premium themes because they are better updated well supported they're coded better they're they're

[00:10:20] fast and secure things like that so it really really all adds up and I'm a big fan of studio press and generate press for themes so I'll leave links to those and then specifically for podcast podcasting websites second

[00:10:37] line themes is excellent so also leave a link to them and you can take a look there now there's some plugins that I recommend you install right away most of them are free so the first one is called Yoast SEO and this is is one of

[00:10:53] it I think it's the most popular SEO plugin for wordpress and it just basically lets you get the basics set up properly and kind of walks you through just little things to I don't know to make your your blog posts and pages better

[00:11:09] optimized so go ahead and install that and they have a nice walkthrough that shows you kind of how to set everything up and then the next one is called Short Pixel and this is a automatic image compression plug-in so what you

[00:11:24] do is install it and then as you upload images in the background they like send them to their servers and then back to your website and it makes your image file size a lot smaller but the quality stays the same it's not

[00:11:39] even noticeable and a smaller file size means that your site loads faster which means that your visitors and listeners are happier and images are one of the largest files basically on on a website as you would imagine so

[00:11:56] that one is crucial and you get you get a handful per month for free I think it might be a hundred images or something so that's plenty and if you need more then you can always buy a one-time package or monthly package I think I bought

[00:12:10] a one-time package of like 20,000 images or something and I don't think I'll ever go go through all that so the next one next plug-in is back WP up if you if use Kinsta you won't need this but if you use if use Bluehost I recommend

[00:12:26] this and what I do is set it up so it automatically backs up to Dropbox every every week and it just it just saves your website and then sends it to Dropbox in that way if you mess something up or if you get hacked or whatever then

[00:12:42] you have a version of your website that you can reload so I think those are crucial you know backing backing your website up doesn't sound all that exciting but when you need it it's crucial and then I have started using WP

[00:12:58] Rocket which is a paid plug-in for caching and it does some other a bunch of other speed stuff like lazy loading which means as you scroll down the page images will will load once they're in view instead of loading the whole

[00:13:14] page at once so just there's a bunch of little stuff that makes your website a lot faster and I'm kind of into the the speed aspect so definitely check that one out. There are there are some other caching style plugins

[00:13:27] that are free but WP Rocket is definitely the easiest to set up and you don't have to really understand a bunch and they have excellent documentation so big fan of that one ever since I switched a few months ago.

[00:13:44] Hey that's it for part one we are going to continue with part two next week so be sure and subscribe and stick around to hear all about that so we're gonna talk about what to write about in your first blog post how to do keyword

[00:13:56] research required pages that you need to include and exactly what to have on those pages and much more so we'll see you next week and thanks for listening.